mbgerring

If you’re one of the people wondering why there’s an enormous backlash to AI, here’s your answer: “this thing we’re building is going to he fucking terrible and ruin your life. Please give us all your money to build it.”

Are you being serious? Are you actually not aware that Elon Musk ran the federal government department tasked with cancelling federal grants and firing government employees in 2025? How is it possible that you are not aware of this?

He personally ran the department that eviscerated funding for basic scientific research in the United States

lol, is it, because last time I checked we’re currently losing a war badly, and we’re out of munitions

I don’t think it’s a messaging problem or a trust problem. I think it’s that the world AI boosters want to create is one that most people don’t want to live in. “You will be fundamentally without agency or purpose, and people you don’t like will shape the world you live in forever according to their whims” sounds bad to most people. Having cures for disease so that I can live longer in a world that I’d rather not live in at all doesn’t sound like a good trade.

So is it just that these are people who haven’t personally experienced well-intentioned technology turning into a living nightmare? Watching the optimism and then collapse of Web 2.0 was a formative experience for me. I’m 38. Is this just naivete? What is this?

The only path forward is to get LSD into the water supply at Davos and put on a really scary play about Rokko’s Basilisk for all the money people, or else Sam Altman won’t be able to afford to repair his infinity pool

My partner and I both just got new jobs after a long period of unemployment. Neither of our new employers offer subsidized health insurance. We both have chronic conditions for which we need regular access to medication. The financial cliff we will both go over going from Medicaid to paying for health insurance via Covered California, and likely paying higher prices for medication in addition to astronomically high (and increasing!) monthly premiums, is going to eat a huge percentage of our increased incomes.

I have no idea who is supposed to benefit from this system, other than the private health insurance companies.

> It does sound like the property management company that owned the building might have been trying to get existing tenants to leave so they could renovate the building. And that's probably ultimately a good thing.

Innocent children were marched out of their homes in the middle of the night by masked & unidentified Federal paramilitary troops with automatic weapons, who broke into the building by helicopter.

I will do everything in my power, for the rest of my life, to comprehensively politically disempower anyone who believes this is “ultimately a good thing.”

It makes me feel like a crazy person seeing that “the government should fund basic R&D that broadly benefits industry” is a concept that so many people find confusing, hard to grasp, or even offensive.

The government should fund AI research and model training. The weights and the models should be free. The provision of inference and tooling should be a competitive business. This feels completely obvious to me.

If AI optimists are correct, and AI can increase productivity across the board, tax revenues go up. Not rocket science.

I started feeling that way around the time ICE illegally broke, entered and ransacked a low-income housing building in Chicago, terrorizing residents regardless of citizenship or immigration status. Once I realized that fear of reprisal was preventing me from expressing how I felt about it online, I resolved instead to get louder and more strident in my public speech than I had been in years.

The people who sincerely believe that humans should be turned into mulch for the Computer God are “well meaning”? Say more

I cannot imagine wanting the product of the entire intellectual output of humanity since recorded history to be an expensive, paywalled commercial product owned by 5 or so of the most insufferable, detestable people who ever lived. Why would you want to live in that world. We should all be rooting for open source AI to win.

“The market rewards intelligent allocation” is such a straightforwardly false statement that I can’t believe anyone still says this with a straight face. The last ten years of the US economy have just been scam after scam after scam, and people just keep saying this.

Not surprising, a bunch of used EV batteries often end up in my underground workshop. They’re great for making portable battery packs.

The battery supply chain is moving away from NMC because of the myriad problems with nickel and cobalt and has been for a long time.

Yes, decarbonization necessarily means higher electricity consumption. Electrifying transportation, home heating, cooking, industrial processes, etc will mean an explosion of electricity demand. This means generating a lot more electricity without burning fossil fuels, and using that electricity more efficiently.

The good news: there’s a lot to build, a lot to invent, and a lot of work to do, and the solutions to these problems are not present in the training data. If you’re worried about how you’re going to pay the bills now that AI ate your job writing glue code for some niche subscription SaaS product, here’s your answer.

I’m going to tell you, as a person whose path went from journalism to activism to engineering in climate tech and climate justice: persuasion isn’t going to get the goods. Changing the reality on the ground through R&D and deployment moves the needle. There are a lot of very good, very smart people who have been heads down since the 70s building the infrastructure for decarbonization, and we’re winning, even as we continue “losing” the political argument.

Instead of arguing about this on the internet you could do what I’m doing: working to take carbon emissions off the board.

It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you can find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.”

Start here: https://climatebase.org

If this is being published in the Wall Street Journal, you can rewrite the headline in your head this way:

“To extract increasing returns from real estate, property prices and rent must be priced out of reach for people whose parents read the Wall Street Journal. Here’s an article you can quote to your friends at cocktail parties to feel good about yourself when your kid moves home.”

Neither the global birthrate, nor the U.S. population, are currently declining. The U.S. population may decline this year following the Trump administration’s massive increase in violent, capricious removal of immigrants regardless of legal status or criminal record.

Birthrates naturally declining is probably a good thing, but it happens too slowly to make a dent in housing prices without additional interventions.

Something I find really confusing from this post is the MLX versions of the model running much slower. As I understand it, these model versions are meant to take advantage of Apple Silicon and MacOS APIs, and should produce better/faster results. Any insight into what’s happening here?

That’s correct, and to my point above, driving immigration down to this degree required a level of violence and cruelty so extreme that even the people who voted for it now disapprove of it. And that’s before the profound economic consequences really hit.

> I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.

Luckily, we have several recent real-life examples demonstrating why “fewer people” is not a viable solution:

Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives, unacceptable to people even in societies that otherwise accept a high level of surveillance and government control, as well as a lot of babies abandoned in dumpsters.

Weighed against the actual consequences of “less people,” just building more houses is very appealing!

I’d bet that there won’t be a RAM shortage for very long.

There is no reason we should accept the enclosure of the digital commons represented by AI. The data these models are trained on amounts to the total intellectual and artistic output of human kind through recorded history. It belongs to all of us, and accordingly, so should the models and weights produced by it.

About $2k in 2026 dollars and falling.

In general I agree with the 3D printing and open source community that bills like these are bad ideas. However, I want to ask this question in the spirit of helping craft better arguments:

Given that it is extremely well known that most commercial printers will refuse to print anything that looks like counterfeit currency, why is this considered technically unworkable?

I agree that compliance would be onerous, but that's different from insisting that it's not possible.

Don’t listen to the daily news == Don’t worry about the massive program of deprivation, destruction and death carried out on your behalf to secure the aforementioned “unprecedented wealth”